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May 29, 2008

I'm seeing these videos make the rounds and I think they warrant some discussion. Do yourself a favor and skip the beginning animation segment-- I seriously groaned and closed the window the first time I was linked to it-- and digest the meat. You'll have to click through to Youtube, as it's in five parts. It's a critique of modern fansubbers and the many, many stupid things they do. It's thorough to the point of nitpicking, the Otaking thing pisses me off, I don't agree with everything the guy says, examples like Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei and its blackboard are self-defeating, it frequently dips into the exact same self-aggrandizing as a typical fansubber might take part in, and never mind the furious wanking in the comments, and especially never mind this final, self-inflicted blow to the guy's crediblity... it's deeply flawed, okay? Doesn't he know that Dattebayo is trolling? But I am all for the core arguments.

What's very interesting is that from the ratings and the comments, anime fans-- and especially fansubbers-- do not like these points. There's even a guy calling him a pedophile! Doing things this way is not the norm, and how dare you say that the norm has flaws! Fansubbing is in fact something that people do out of their own free time: they are absolutely entitled to do whatever they want, because they really don't owe anybody anything. The logical jump that people make is that because of this, they are somehow immune to all criticism. Furthermore, that anybody who makes a criticism is a squat, big-headed Hitler with ^s for eyes. That's not how it works.

As far as I'm concerned, fansubbing's dirty little public secret is that the hobby is completely ego-driven. If it wasn't, we'd all be using softsubs. In theory, this is fine: competition will make the fansubbers work harder and everybody benefits, riiight? Of course not. If you follow the scene, you know that's not what happens: a no-nonsense translation is not as good for a fansub group's collective ego as a pile of useless things. Double-digit numbers of groups working on the same popular show, benefitting nobody but their spiritually throbbing internet penises. All the ridiculous effects and karaoke and credits and pidgin English and auto-fellatio that are effectively lampooned in this video: they're all totally out of place in the original work and there's no question in my mind that they actively detract from it.

Fansub groups (of course I don't mean all of them, jeez) overvalue their role in the process. Over and over again, often literally, groups put themselves over the work, and over the people who've done the immeasurably fucking harder work of putting together the anime. Even ADV or Macek were never so shameless about taking credit for the show they translated.

5/31: Edited to skip the first video, and inserted further references (via wildarmsheero) to oh my god this guy's credibility does not exist.

May 28, 2008

Ah, Go-Lion. I mean Voltron. I mean Go-Lion. They're the same to me. Like millions of American kids of the 80's, I spent my early childhood cheering for a space robot made out of mechanical lions. Voltron was my introduction to the Japanese super robot. I wouldn't come back to it for years, but when I encountered the Japanese super robot mythology, this mysterious, beloved object of my youth started to make sense. There are certainly better super robot anime (even better super robot anime with lions), but Voltron was the one I watched when I was a kid. There's no substitute for that. Now, I regard it with the same warm, fuzzy, and cheesy sentiment that permeates the whole genre. So do rappers.

Anyway, as often happened with popular televised anime back in the day, Go-Lion was greatly altered in order to make Voltron. Going back to the show as an adult, it's quite clear that something was a little weird about Voltron: alcohol was turned to water, death is altogether excised (a minor character who drowns onscreen is said to have "gone swimming"), that kind of thing. And as was common with these things, the original Japanese version remained unavailable in English. Go-Lion was just the strange name that I read on the back of my old Matchbox Voltron toy. Up until now, thank God! Media Blasters is made out of a bunch of cool guys, and after their box sets of Voltron just made them loads of money, they saw fit to go back and release Go-Lion without any alterations.

Boy, is Go-Lion ever a surprise. As it turns out, the show is much darker than even its Japanese contemporaries. It's certainly a kid's show, but it's still pretty brutal. When we meet our heroes, the Earth has been destroyed by nuclear war: accompanied, in a flashback, by the screams of the dying, kids burning in nuclear flames, what have you. Their captors (and the antagonists of the series) remain an empire of slave-runners who pit their slaves against genre-standard mechanical monsters in coliseums for fun. But I don't recall Voltron ever giving me the details of that arrangement: the dead are eaten. Cooked up in stews. Our heroes walking among the skeletal remains of the dead, shots of monsters chomping on slave parts: death hangs all over this thing. And Ichiro Mizuki sings the theme songs! The combination sequence lacks the famous "and I'll form the head!" speech from Voltron, making it way less cool. Whether "Beast King Sword" sounds cooler than "Blazing Sword" is a question, dear reader, that I'll leave up to you.

The heart of it is still the same, of course: after a rocky start, Go-Lion takes on some monster every week, and after a bit of meaningless tussling, slices the poor sucker in half. You know what you're getting here, and as such Media Blasters' release of Go-Lion is as bare-bones as it gets: it's just the first 18 episodes, subtitled only, no extras, for $35 retail. With a price like that, hell, keep it comin'. Media Blasters has been doing a lot of cheap retro box sets lately, and as a result they've got my money. Plus, it really warms my heart to know that in the original version, Go-Lion challenged the goddess of the universe to a fight. Even if he lost.

May 26, 2008

Only pictures do this justice, so we are going to have a lot of pictures. It's worth it, you know! Jojo A-Go! Go! is just amazing. It is absolutely god damn incredible. This is not debatable. Even the clerk gasped. If you're not familiar with Jojo's Bizarre Adventure I'll give you a quick rundown: the occupation of noted mad genius Hirohiko Araki since 1987, Jojo is the story of the globetrotting superhero Joestar family, from generation to generation. While, at first glance, a typical Shonen Jump fight comic, Jojo distinguishes itself in so many ways. Araki has a gift for suspense and a boundless imagination. The fights he draws are most often battles of wits, and the protagonists are guys who can come up with ingenious-- but not quite ridiculous-- plans to keep from getting killed. Anyway, Araki's art.... what's to say about Araki's art that isn't better said by simply looking at it? There's nobody quite like him.

You'll note the little thumb-shaped notch on the right side, the little metal bit at the center of the circle, and the . This is because that circle is in fact a disc. It spins. On the box are various cut-outs which the disc can be seen through. On the disc are characters' faces. You know, characters like Iggy and Polnareff and Hirohiko Araki.

You'll further note that this box appears to contain three "discs", but given the size and the heft of the thing, it's pretty clear that there is something else in there. Something... like... books.

The first two books we see are an encyclopedia of all the series' Stands-- manifestations of psychic energy that fight for the heroes from Part 3 of the series on-- and a long interview with Araki himself. Quality educational material, but the shiniest and prettiest part is yet to come.

Here's the full set! Illustrations is the meat of the set, with its big, glossy, colorful character art.

The first eight or so pages are just pictures of everybody dancing. That's how Araki rolls. So as not to take up even more space, I'm simply going to link you to the last three pictures I took, here, here, and here. These are what we call "Jojo poses": Araki absolutely loves drawing his characters in floating-in-midair poses which appear physically impossible, and impossibly fabulous. In conclusion, I can't believe I found this thing. I can't believe anybody would even sell it to a used bookstore in the first place. What a treasure.

May 25, 2008

This is a book about Akagi, so I bought it right away without bothering to see what was inside. What would the point have been? It was a book about Akagi. That means buy. Like it says on the cover, this is a guidebook to the TV series. All the standard stuff you would expect from a book of this type, like character profiles, episode summaries, and ads for the merchandise (hey man have you seen this Akagi cellphone game? it's sweet, buy it now bro). In the back, there are a couple of interviews with the producer, voice actors, and Fukumoto himself. Pretty average stuff.

What this book really brought to my attention is that some kind of live-actionadaptations of Akagi seem to exist. If you'd like to watch an untranslated movie about a bunch of guys standing around a table playing mahjong, and you have a Nicovideo account, check that good shit out here and here. On the other hand, if you want to see some dudes play Washizu Mahjong for real (minus the blood loss), that's here. I should make a post about getting a Nicovideo account, but until then I'll count on you to not be a sucker and Google it.

This is a book chock-full of Kunio Ohkawara's mechanical design work for Sunrise's Brave Series of super robot anime. It is absolutely nothing but page after page of black-and-white lineart: a big old chunk of the life's work of the single greatest legend in Japanese super robot design. A real joy for fans like myself, and, indeed, for anybody who thinks it's totally cool to wear the head of a mechanical animal on your chest. The book is understandably half-Gaogaigar and half everybody else, including the never-animated Baan Gaan. Every page is a new "oh man, that's awesome."

Most interesting in this book is the amount of redesigns that a lot of the robots went though, particularly Gaogaigar himself: his design must really have been agonized over. There are three other books in this series: one for Ohkawara's work on Gundam and Daitarn 3, another for Dougram and Votoms, and one more for Dragonar, Layzner and (if you click any of these links, click this one) Vifam. I want all of these books.

Next is the jackpot, Jojo A-Go! Go! I'm splitting that part into a separate post, because this one is already big enough.

May 24, 2008

Call me culturally insensitive, but this is ridiculous. Accidentally sticking a page of anybody's holy scripture into your animation is an ill-advised move, but pulling that single animation mistake way out of its context and deciding that this work is saying that Muslims are terrorists is a logical jump so far it actually circles the earth and lands the jumper ten steps back. It's the most terrible kind of joke. It is absolutely tragic for human society as a whole that a religious leader, someone with a great responsibility to the people of his faith, should run along with an irrational mob mentality and declare a bunch of innocent people enemies of the faith. For what? Who gains anything out of this? It's not that I'm surprised: it's just terribly sad. I don't know why people of all faiths can't move past this suicidal idea that everybody else is the enemy and we all need to kill each other for God. I'm not of any faith myself, but that can't be right. We can't be here just to kill each other.

I don't blame Shueisha or A.P.P.P. for taking the action they're taking-- the inclusion of the Qur'an was a legitimate mistake on the part of the animation staff and if it's a mistake that so deeply upset someone, I don't see why it shouldn't be fixed-- but I know enough about my own country's fundamentalists to know that the point of view that brings about a situation this severe over a screwup this tiny is completely insane. What's to do about it, though? We're stuck on this goddamn planet together and if enough of us throw enough bullshit everybody's got to put up with it. How depressing.

That said, the real important thing to remember here is that I just scored a copy of the Jojo A-Go-Go artbook, and it is an unbelievably beautiful object. Right now I'm too sleepy to take an appropriate amount of pictures of the big pretty thing and too damned angry not to say something about the controversy, so I'll make a separate post about this magnificent piece of work soon.

May 23, 2008

Not making that up: I looked up the director of this film, Ei Aoki, and it turned out his only other major work was noted dreck Girls Bravo. You'd never guess it from his work on this episode of Kara no Kyoukai. You see, Kara no Kyoukai is an experiment: a theatrical anime serial. The film I just watched was only about ffity minutes long, and just like a TV or direct-to-video anime episode it even has a next episode preview. And the next episode is a two-parter! Vicious! The theatrical run and the adorable stop-motion-- animation studio ufotable loves stop-motion-- "turn off your cellphone" warning are the only things that separate this from a big-budget OVA.This episode came out in Japanese theaters back in December, and the fourth film in the series is out tomorrow in Japan. Meanwhile, we get to watch live-action Death Note dubbed weirdly into English. THANKS, VIZ, I GUESS.

Kara no Kyoukai is an adaptation of an early novel by TYPE-MOON's Kinoko Nasu. You guys remember when I was blogging Tsukihime? Aside from the implausiblity of ever finishing the task I had made for myself-- I was maybe a tenth of the way through one of six routes when I stopped blogging-- even when playing the game for my own enjoyment, I ran into Nasu's desperate need for an editor one too many times. Eventually I quit halfway through Ciel's story, from simple boredom. So with this, I am happy to be plunging back into my love-disgust relationship with T-M.

The main characters of this story are clear prototypes of Tsukihime's protagonist Shiki Tohno, the heroine being named Shiki herself, and the hero looking just like him. Shiki is a quiet, creepy, intense girl with big dead grey eyes and similar knife-wielding abilities to Shiki's. She talks like a man. The guy, on the other hand, spends most of the movie as a comatose damsel in distress who isn't terribly interesting when he's finally awake, either. It is made clear that they luuuuv each other, but Shiki is one of those overdone, grating tsundere characters who says "shut up I do what I want" and immediately blushes into her sheets in the film's last scene. I bet the audience was all "UOOOOOOO" as the credits rolled.

The two of them work at, uh... actually, I don't think they ever tell you what the hell this place is where they work. It must be assumed that the viewer read the book and knows what this place is. I certainly never figured it out. Either a newspaper or a detective agency? Checking Wikipedia on this point would betray the fact that the movie doesn't get to this point itself, nor does it supply any background or context on the characters at all. Their boss is Touko Aozaki, sister of Tsukihime's Aoko, who you might remember. Touko makes dolls in the back room. Anyway, it seems that a chain of suicides has something to do with some mysterious building, and that this mysterious building has something to do with the days-long unconsciousness of the hero (which, bizarrely, is treated with a shrug by his co-workers until halfway through the damn movie). Since Shiki luuuuuuvs this guy, she sets out to investigate. In between, people talk about suicide and floating and flying.

A plot summary of this movie makes it sound terribly boring and generic, I'm realizing, but I have to say that I was transfixed while actually watching it. It's really a sight to see, especially when Shiki gets to the fluid, elegant movements involved in slicing up everything around her. You know what? I'm just going to show you things that are in this movie. Here are Shiki's rainbow eyes, an outtake from Silent Hill, Kiri Komori, and doll parts. There is also a painstakingly animated sequence of Shiki opening a Haagen-Dasz that impressed the shit out of me. Scoops.

Sorry, by the way, but while this is in fact a widescreen movie, the aspect ratio on my screenshots comes out all wrong. I didn't want to go back and fix the billion screenshots I made, so I'll just blame Media Player Classic.

May 20, 2008

I'm going to assume that you understand the Yu-Gi-Oh card-selling media machine and how it works. The cartoon sells the kid the card game and the kid goes out and spends money on the card game. Like Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh takes place in a world where nobody does anything but engage in activities related to the Yu-Gi-Oh franchise. It's a fine setup for, say, a videogame, but it makes for awful entertainment for the spectator. Knowing this, why did I bother wasting the bandwidth on the first episode of this show? Well, you see, it's Yu-Gi-Oh on bikes. I just wanted to see how, why in the hell anybody would play a children's card game on a futuristic motorcycle.

It turns out they just put the damn things on auto-pilot. Other than that everything is exactly the same as you'd expect: a dreadfully boring card-game tutorial with moderate production values. What a bust. Also, what bizarre fansubbing choices.

May 19, 2008

What I love about this is that everybody does exactly the wrong thing. I have supplied the original opening for comparison purposes, but I can't find the one with the original Japanese text on Youtube at all. Forgive.